I am Yahya from Baghdad, Iraq. 31 years, Freelance Engineering Consultant and Management Specialist, Single, Liberal, I talk Arabic, English, and little French. I am level 7 local guide on google maps. I was intended to apply for Connect Live 2020 as I got the email early March, but I did not have the time to do so, as I was super busy with the preparation for the Corona Virus crisis as we have a forced curfew and had to prepare by shopping and having every required thing ready at home. Additionally, I have been working from home during the last couple weeks and it has been very overwhelming as I ended up doing almost double the regular hours because of the insanely increased amount of phone calls and emails exchange every day.
I wanted to apply today and just found out the deadline was yesterday and I have unintentionally missed it, I thought it was until the end of the months (today included, 31 March 2020), I only knew that the deadline was yesterday after it was missed. I was wondering if there can be an exception or if I can still apply in a way or another, I truly want to attend the event and would really appreciate being given the opportunity to apply for this event and looking forward to participate in it.
I tried to find a way to contact someone from Google but this is the only place I found to ask my question, so if any of Google staff can hep me solving this, it would be really appreciated!
I can always be reached via the contact details listed below. Thank you all in advance and looking forward to hear back from you the soonest.
As per terms you can’t apply after 8:00 pm 30 March 2020. So you missed chance for this year. Continue your hard work and apply next year if you eligible.
Good to know about you. I am so sorry to know that you missed the application deadline. As per Google’s terms and conditions, there are no extensions to application deadline and even the portal was closed yesterday, meaning there wont be any submissions now. Google team worked really hard to resolve issues during the application period and this year we had an excellent connect platform response with almost zero downtime. Having said that, we did not get any time extension this year.
Even if there are any extensions, they are for everyone and not awarded on personal basis, to the best of my knowledge.
I can understand how you feel, but please do not give up and keep contributing on Maps and here on connect. I am sure your passion and contributions will make your application shine for all the next events to come.
This year, we announced our application period, from March 2 to March 30th, 17 days in advance on Connect to give Local Guides plenty of time to prepare their application materials and/or earn points to become eligible to apply.
In addition, I’ve removed your personal information from this post. We do not encourage Local Guides to share private information publicly on Connect in order to protect yours and other users’ privacy and safety. Please take a moment to review our Community policy and check these 14 helpful tips for using Connect on using this community before posting.
P.S.: Your post was moved to the How-tos board, as this would be helpful to fellow Local Guides searching for similar questions and will remove the Arabic language tag from your post, because you are writing in English.